The Schwartz Cloud Reportby Jeffrey Schwartz, Executive Editor

Red Hat's PaaS Play

The plan, announced this week, is to enable partners to build their own cloud services using its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution and JBoss middleware tuned with Makara's Cloud Application Platform.

Red Hat intends to deliver a PaaS Automation Engine that will provide automatic scaling, monitoring and high availability, according to Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit.

"This strategy is designed to provide the most scalable, portable and open clouds, clouds that are consistent between the cloud environment and the enterprise environment," Crenshaw said on a conference call announcing the deal.

But that led to the question: How will portability work? Issac Roth a co-founder and CEO Markara explained that apps can be migrated unmodified to the cloud. "As long as the application is written to Red Hat Linux, and supported middleware such as JBoss or LAMP," Roth said.

Cloud operators can use Makara's PaaS to deploy, manage and scale JBoss and LAMP applications with a variety of middleware components including caching different pieces of application middleware and messaging, Roth added. "This is the technology that will be incorporated into [Red Hat's] Cloud Foundations to enable platform-as-a-service for enterprises," he said.

That said, Crenshaw said Red Hat will take the best of Makara's platform and integrate it into JBoss. In other words, Makara's Cloud Application Platform will not continue to be offered as a standalone product. However Crenshaw said the technology will be open-sourced.

What's your take on Red Hat's acquisition of Makara and the company's PaaS efforts? Drop me a line at jschwartz@1105media.com.